She sat there with her back against the shed wall, trying to calm her abused senses. She hadn’t been this rattled since the Disaster. But at least she wasn’t sliding into unconsciousness this time. She was pretty sure the psychic side of her nature hadn’t been shattered.
Pretty sure. She just needed time to get her act together, she thought.
The auroras started then, the brilliant green lights flooding the night sky, infusing the thick fog with an eerie green glow. It didn’t make it any easier to see things in the mist, but at least the world was no longer so oppressively dark.
Maybe she was hallucinating again. No, she had seen the auroras last night and the night before that. Everyone else in Shadow Bay had seen them, too. The locals said they were a common atmospheric event around Halloween. The waves of light were real.
A familiar rumble came out of the fog.
“Lyle,” she said. “About time you showed up. Hope you had fun tonight. I had a blast.”
Lyle appeared out of the glowing green mist. She wouldn’t have been able to see him at all if it were not for the fact that he had all four eyes open. He hopped up onto her knees and made urgent little noises.
“It’s okay,” she said. She reached out to pat his head. “But I need a minute here.”
Lyle rumbled again, jumped down off her knees, and disappeared into the green mist.
“Just when you think you’ve found the right guy,” Sedona said, “he ups and disappears on you.”
Damn. Now she was talking to herself. This was not good. Maybe she had hallucinated Lyle. It was a deeply disturbing thought. Maybe the drugs they had given her in Blankenship’s lab had done more damage than she had realized. Maybe there had been no psi-trap in the bedroom tonight. Maybe she wasn’t seeing aurora light reflected in the fog. Maybe she was permanently lost in a dreamscape.
More footsteps echoed in the mist. She listened closely. Boots, this time, and moving fast. She wondered if she was now having auditory hallucinations. Dreams were strange.
She listened hard, wondering if the boots would go into the house. But they didn’t. They came directly toward the woodshed.
Lyle materialized out of the bright fog. All four eyes still open. But this time he chortled reassuringly and bounced up onto her thigh.
Relief flashed through her. She clutched him close.
The boot steps came to a halt. She was suddenly pinned in the beam of a flashlight. When she looked up she saw a large dark shadow looming in the mist.
“What the hell is going on here?” Cyrus said.
“It’s sort of complicated,” Sedona said.
She put down the rock and struggled to get to her feet.
Cyrus reached down and helped her stand.
The physical contact was a mistake. She knew it instantly but by then it was too late. She was in the midst of a post-burn buzz. The crash would come later, but for now all of her senses were at high-rez and not under full control.
“Wait,” she gasped. “You don’t want to do this.”
But Cyrus had already scooped her up into his arms. “Take the flashlight.”
She took the flashlight in her right hand. She was still clutching the flicker in her other hand. She aimed the flashlight at the front porch.
“I’m trying to explain something,” she said. “I’m a little jittery at the moment. I’m not in full control of my senses. I think I may have been psi-burned.”
Cyrus carried her up the steps. “What are you worried about?”
Small sparks and flames leaped in the atmosphere. One of them nipped at the front of his shirt. She smelled charring fabric and realized that she had accidentally rezzed the flicker. She groaned.
“Well, among other things, I might set your shirt on fire,” she said.
He looked down and smiled. She felt a rush of energy—Cyrus’s talent, not her own, she realized. The tiny flames that threatened his shirt evaporated. So did the little sparks in the atmosphere. Her frazzled senses seemed to sigh in relief.
“How did you do that?” she whispered.
“Why do you think they call me Dead Zone Jones? I’m a cooler.”